


Boundless and Bare

by AstroGirl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, outside pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-30
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-25 21:43:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10773045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: The Doctor saves yet another species.





	Boundless and Bare

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Tic Tac Woe apocalypse bingo challenge, for the prompt "planetary resources exhausted." And it's a scenario I'm almost willing to bet must have happened to the Doctor at some point or other.

The Doctor came to save us.

We cowered from him at first, desperately afraid. But he saved us. And we let him. Because we knew, in the end, that he and his pity for us were our only hope. We knew we were in our last days. Everything was used up, exhausted, gone. _Everything._ It had been a generation since our power supplies faltered and the last of the lights went out. The machines of our ancestors, those miracles of technology that once supported an empire that stretched among the stars, sat idle and deteriorating until, one by one, they were dismantled to fashion shelters and weapons and tools. Because there was nothing else left to make those things from, nothing but scraps and stone. 

The metals, never abundant on our planet to begin with, were long gone from the ground. The great strongwood trees from which our elegant houses were once made had all been burned for warmth. So had their lesser relatives, and even the inferior scrubplants, which produced much smoke and little light. All gathered and consumed, until the forests were barren wastes and the inhabitants of the colder climates, in desperation, attacked those of the warmer in hopes of claiming their lands, only to die on the points of spears that had once been parts of starships.

But those in the warmlands died, too, unable to grow enough food in the worn, depleted soil. There were no game animals left. Our ancestors had hunted them for sport, traded them to alien zoos, but left none alive in the wild.

We were dying, all of us. We, who had once been the envy and the terror of the galaxy! We, who once rampaged through the stars, destroying all who crossed us, taking anything we desired, annihilating entire planets and growing rich on their debris. We, who needed nothing from our homeworld, because every other world was ours to take. 

Until the Doctor stopped us. Until he destroyed the source of our power. Until he exiled us here to live out our lives on the barren, used-up rock that spawned us.

Until he came back.

We cowered from him at first, certain he was here to finish the job he had begun before our own slow decay could do it for him. But he said nothing about our past as conquerors, only berated us for what we had done to our own world. Then he gathered us up, all us poor, starving survivors. He activated the last, hidden starship of our ancestors and sent us all to a rich, beautiful, uninhabited new home. He did not caution us not to repeat our history. He did not treat us as anything but victims.

And we were left to wonder. In his long, long life, how many worlds has he seen destroyed? How many pillagers and conquerors has he laid low? How many empires like ours has he overthrown?

We think the answer must be many. Very, very many. Because we do not believe that he remembered us at all.


End file.
